YesAccessible!

Software Solutions for the Blind

Since its introduction at a packed presentation during the 2000 CSUN conference in Los Angeles, CakeTalking has changed the lives of all kinds of blind musicians from students who can now independently prepare and print their music theory assignments, to working professionals who produce entire album projects for clients who pay them a competitive hourly rate for their audio production services. During that ground-breaking CSUN presentation, CakeTalking's creator, David Pinto, invited four of his blind students to show how they use Cakewalk's MIDI/Audio program with CakeTalking. In one short hour an enthusiastic audience witnessed the following:

A six-year-old girl recorded and orchestrated the Spinning Song for piano, french horns, flutes and percussion.

A college undergraduate recorded a melody and displayed it in staff notation.

An eighteen-year-old composed a theme for a news program including a fade for the announcer.

A fourteen-year-old recorded the piano, guitar and bass parts for her own song and then recorded herself singing the lead vocal and three harmony parts.

SONAR 8 is Cakewalk's most advanced MIDI/Audio program, and is used by professional around the world. CakeTalking is an extensive set of scripts for the JAWS screen reader that makes SONAR8 accessible. In the past, blind users had been creating sound recordings with Cakewalk's MIDI/Audio programs. However, reliable access and sensible instruction has been lacking, until now! CakeTalking gets you up and running and creating right away!

The key commands are intuitive and easy to learn.

Extensive online help and a separate 300 page tutorial direct you in recording, editing and even printing out your music. Online help is always just a key stroke away.

Our customers are already using CakeTalking with SONAR8 and JAWS to create everything from song demos to professional radio jingles and CDs for recording artists.

What Users Have to Say

"Until CakeTalking I had to rely on sighted assistants and a mix of less than state-of-the-art technologies to complete assignments for my ad agency clients in Japan. With CakeTalking for SONAR, I can independently record and edit vocals, voice-overs and background music in less than half the time I did before. I feel like now, for the first time, I can truly compete on an equal footing in this industry."

"As a CakeTalking user, It's great to be able to work and collaborate with sighted people and know that I am, in some cases, more competent with Sonar than they are. It is a particularly nice feeling when someone rings you up and you are able to tell them how to do something."

Richard Synnott. Winning composer of the 2002 Song for Wales and Pan-Celtic Competitions